Cape May Diaries
6- Opossum crossing the road
“Look out!” my newly wed wife screamed, during our last few miles before reaching Cape May in October, 1990.
I slammed on the brakes – not for the mythological stop sign my family members had warned we might encounter on the last stretch of Garden State Parkway before Cape May, but rather because as sluggish baby opossum waddled across the highway – oblivious to us and our car’s high beams illuminating it.
Because we had stopped at my family’s home in Tom’s River on our way south after our marriage ceremony for our honeymoon in Cape May in October 1990, a heavy darkness had settled over the highway, and the poor opossum was the first sign of life we had seen since passing the nuclear power plant at Little Egg Harbor.
Although we had seen the glow of Atlantic City and its suburbs over the vast stretches of wetlands to our east, the highway had remained significantly empty with a rare set of headlights popping up at intervals, only to vanish again as locals used the highway as a short cut.
It was almost as if we had transcended time, slipping through some narrow crack in the universe to some remote past and could expect Native American Indians to step out along the highway side to greet us or that we would at any moment arrive at a place where we would see whalers gutting a beached whale the way they did when this part of the county served as sea port.
We had come more than 200 miles through some of the most populated portions of the state, rubbing bumpers with Atlantic City bound masses only to half for a baby opossum crossing the miles five miles of our destination. The stop sign – which would vanish one or two later to be replaced with a traffic light – proved something of an anti-climax when we finally encountered it a short time later as was the traffic light at the foot of the harbor bridge marking the official ending of the Garden State Parkway (at exit zero) and the beginning of Cape May.
A short ride after that, we indeed, did encounter the stop sign, but by that time, it seemed less important than it had at a distance. We stopped, looked both ways, and then motored on towards nearby Cape May.
Unlike some other historic places in the state, such as Waterloo Village in Stanhope, Cape May did not emphasize the history of its earliest visitors. While there are no accounts or historic record of the Lenape Native Americans in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from their own point of view, as there were of the literal and figurative descendents of Henry Hudson, travelers, landowners and ministers from England, Holland and Sweden gave some account of Native American life in New Jersey.
Hudson's famous journal gave nearly no information about the Lenapes, except for brief glimpses of the conflict to come. Hudson's crew "with twelve men and musket and two stone pieces" drove "the savages from their houses and took spoil from them."
More kind to the Indians was a Swedish minister Johannes Campanius., who treated them with compassion and translated the Lutheran catechism into the Delaware language. The governor of nearby New Sweden -- who the Lenape called "Big Belly" -- despised the natives and often expressed contempt for them in his communications back to Europe.
"Nothing would be better than that a couple of hundred soldiers should be sent here and kept here until we broke the neck of all of them in the river," he said in an account printed by New Jersey historian, Herbert C. Kraft.
The Lenape, by the time the English sailed into the Delaware River in 1634, located Lenape settlements in New Albion in the southwestern section of New Jersey.
Yet long before Hudson or Philadelphia discovered Cape May, the Lenape did, making regular visits to is shore to fish, trap and collect shells (which they polished into their version of money). Life for them had gone on largely the same for thousands of years, fathers passing down knowledge of hunting and fish to their sons, while mothers did as much to pass on the art of weaving and tanning to their daughters. Their life was sacred and invested with spirituality, which touched every aspect of their living.
Tribes often came to Cape May and spent the summer on its beaches, fishing and hunting here. They also farmed here, and conducted trading with other tribes. Like later visitors, the Lenapes arrived largely by boat, did their chores here, and then paddled back to villages up or across the Delaware.
The English, Dutch and Swedish settlers, who arrived in the 1600s, drove the Indians off. Those Lenapes unfortunate enough to be captured were used as slaves on farms during and after the revolutionary war.
Although the Lenape relinquished all land rights in New Jersey in 1758 with the Treaty of Easton, many lingered on afterwards despite the exodus of the general Indian population to west to Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Canada. In Cape May, they became a curiosity lingered into the Victorian age after the American Civil War, where they became a kind of side show in the carnival-like antics typical of the era. Tourist accounts from that time described the remaining Lenapes as a decrepit crew, more sad than exotic.
Novelist Fredericka Bremer in her report from Cape May in 1849-50 said: "Among the novelties here at the present moment are some Indians who have pitched their tents in the neighborhood of the hotels on the shore, and there weave baskets and fans according to Indian tastes, with other small wares they sell to -- anybody who will buy them. The men are half-blood Indians, but the women are true squaws, with black, with elflocks, and strong features. They are ugly, but the children are pretty, with splendid eyes, and as well as little wild beasts."
But it was not the Lenape culture Cape May's city fathers chose to preserve, as if history had started with Cornelius Mey's arrival in the early 1600s. Ancient history here seemed to be the arrival of the whalers and its culture of the sea. Indeed, as we crossed the bridge into Cape May, the harbor confronted us, loaded with its whale watching and deep-sea fishing vessels, a rocking forest of bare masts and ringing rigging.